Gertrude Stein - by Francesca Wade (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Drawing on never-before-seen interviews, a richly researched, sweeping examination of one of the most influential and mythologized literary figures of the 20th century and her partner's emergence from the shadows after her death, in the decades-long fight to ensure her legacy.

Gertrude Stein's salon at 27 rue de Fleurus in the 6th arrondissement of Paris is the stuff of literary legend. Many have tried to capture the spirit and glamour of the place that once entertained and fostered the likes of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse, but perhaps none as determinedly, and self-consciously, as Stein herself. In this new biography of the polarizing, trailblazing author, collector, salonnière, and tastemaker, Francesca Wade rescues Stein from the tangle of contradictions that has characterized her legacy, expertly presenting us with this towering literary figure as we've never seen her before.

A genius to her admirers, a charlatan to her detractors, Stein achieved international celebrity in 1933 with her bestselling memoir, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written in the voice of her devoted partner--a triumph which, ironically, only drew attention away from the avant-garde poetry she called her "real" writing. After Stein's death in 1946, Alice B. Toklas made it her mission to shepherd all of Stein's unpublished writing into print, all the while negotiating her own fraught role in the complex mythology they had built together. The biographers who flocked to Stein's newly opened archive found a surprising trove of secrets which would change Stein's image forever: a forgotten novel, a cache of love letters, and a series of notebooks which shed entirely new light on her early years in Paris.

Pushing beyond the conventions of literary biography, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is a bold, innovative examination of the nature of legacy and memory itself, in which Wade uncovers the origins of Stein's radical writing and reveals new depths to the storied relationship that made it possible. A captivating, brilliant work of biography, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is a groundbreaking examination of a true literary giant.

Review Quotes

"Wade on Stein is a perfect miracle. I feel like I have been waiting for this book my entire life."
--Sheila Heti, author of Alphabetical Diaries

"A fascinating and inventive biography of a reputation. There is so much to say about the book. It is terrific."
--Darryl Pinckney, author of Come Back in September

"The perfect counterpoint of subtle, elegant biographical writing with a subject who is outrageous, larger-than-life, and anything but subtle. A total joy to read."
--Sarah Bakewell, author of At the Existentialist Café

"Francesca Wade's wise, humane, deeply researched and beautifully written book at last gives Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas the artistic afterlife they deserve, and invents a new form of biography to do so."
--Rachel Cohen, author of A Chance Meeting: American Encounters

"'Facts of life make literature, ' Gertrude Stein wrote in explanation of her writing process; Francesca Wade makes literature of the facts of Stein's life in her revelatory, innovative new biography, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife. Fusing literary analysis, biographical narrative, and archival detective work, Wade offers a fresh appraisal of Modernism's founding mother and her helpmeet Alice B. Toklas, complicating the story of a love that survived two world wars to live on in the words Stein crafted, Toklas and her minions curated, and Wade skillfully interprets, granting Stein the "afterlife" she so eminently deserves."
--Megan Marshall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life and After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart

"In Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, Francesca Wade grapples brilliantly with a subject who famously reveled in non-sequitur and paradox and defied easy categorization. Wade's wise and elegant prose does not pin Stein down so much as illuminate the complexities of a writer alternately regarded as a self-mythologizing charlatan and a titan of modernism. An exquisite literary biography."
--Rebecca Donner, author of All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days

"Narrated with grace and patience, Francesca Wade's Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife tells how Stein's beloved companion Alice Toklas, staying on alone, fostered and maintained Stein's much deserved and hard-won reputation as brilliant, uncategorizable, and generative. A touching tale of a contrary, enigmatic, self-conscious couple devoted to writing, experiment, collaboration, and to love."
--Brenda Wineapple, author of Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation

"Francesca Wade's great coup here is to make us understand that there are as many Steins as readers of Stein; that her non-essential essence resides in the relays between her, Toklas, a gaggle of male modernists, a media that wanted a personality but not the challenge of her prose, and a posterity that's only just beginning to find labels for what she was doing. It's a double-coup: to track these shifts and, in their very transpositions, their reflections and diffractions and inversions, to coax an image sharply into view, clear as the lucid if continually morphing picture inside a kaleidoscope."
--Tom McCarthy, author of The Making of Incarnation

"Told with grace, passion, erudition and insight, Wade's story of the iconic Stein and Toklas, their intertwined lives, writings and legacy, is also the story of modernism then and now. This is an utterly absorbing book, at once a discerning literary biography and a page-turning whodunit."
--Lisa Appignanesi, author of Trials of Passion

"A thrillingly intelligent and original book. Not only a tour-de-force of biographical writing, but also a breakthrough in biographical form."
--Edmund Gordon, author of The Invention of Angela Carter

"[A] masterpiece of biography...Wade shows a great sensitivity to the morality of biography writing...She's an exceptional writer, able to draw out the legend, the contradictions and the reality in a fully coherent, dizzyingly comprehensive triptych... She cares as much about the work as she does the complex, brilliant and contradictory person who created it. Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, exhaustively researched and beautifully written, will become the definitive biography."
--The Telegraph

"'Impressive... As an experiment in biography, [Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife] is strikingly accomplished; as a tale of literary intrigue, it is utterly compelling...For one so invested in her afterlife, [Stein] would have been pleased with such fruits, one imagines, although with none more perhaps than this rich and moving biography of her life and work, placing Toklas at its centre. Vindication at last."
--The Sunday Times

"Beguiling...Invigorating...The full story of their love affair can only now be told, uncensored, in an afterlife that Wade captures so vividly here."
--The Financial Times

"When I had finished reading this tremendous biography, I was so exhilarated and intrigued that I started to look for archive footage of Gertrude Stein... Wade's book is especially impressive [because of] the structure, which had a salient link to Stein's most famous work...This is not dry academia, but an insightful examination of how lives are protected, memorialised and canonised...Wade also engages, critically, creatively and respectfully with Stein's work."
--The Scotsman

"A sensitive, compelling study...Wade shows that even the most abstract art is bound up with life...[Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife] reveal[s] something unlikely and essential about Stein: she wrote to connect with others."
--Literary Review

"Thoughtful and deeply researched."
--The Guardian

"Wade's revelations contribute to a nuanced portrait of Stein, Toklas, and their relationship....A probing examination of an enigmatic writer."
--Kirkus Reviews

About the Author

Francesca Wade is the author of Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars (2020). She has received fellowships from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, the Leon Levy Center for Biography and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and her writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, Paris Review, Granta, and elsewhere.